Librarians Leading Short-Term Study Abroad

In Brief: Study abroad is a well-established method for transformative learning, recognized by the American Association of Colleges and Universities as a high-impact practice. Over the past decade, short-term faculty-led study abroad—immersive academic courses lasting eight weeks or less—has quickly become the most popular type of international experience in the United States, comprising more than 62% of all study abroad (Fast Facts Open Doors, 2015). Shorter and less expensive than traditional term or year-long experiences, these courses can potentially make study abroad more accessible to more students, in particular underrepresented populations. Librarians are highly qualified educators, yet they rarely lead these types of programs. In summer 2016, as faculty librarians at Oregon State University, we led a short-term study abroad course and have committed to leading the same course for the next four summers. In this article, we will describe the process of developing our study abroad course, in the hopes that you can replicate a similar course at your college or university. This type of study abroad is a natural fit for information literacy related topics. Read the article

Caption: Magali Sánchez, a student in our class who continued her travels to France and Italy after our time in Barcelona.
Screenshot used with permission by Magali Sánchez (CC BY 4.0 International).

Introduction

The benefits of study abroad for students are well-documented, and many colleges and universities have ambitious plans to expand the numbers of students who participate. Librarians can absolutely be a part of these initiatives, although it may take some creative work to get you there. Using our course, Information and Global Social Justice as a case study, this article will help you consider how to develop a librarian-led short-term study abroad at your university or college. We will take you through key steps in our process: making the case for faculty-led study abroad, investigating possible options, preparing a study abroad course proposal, promoting the course, through teaching your first study abroad course.

The term “study abroad” may make you think of students spending a semester or full year in another country, perhaps enrolled in courses at a local university. However, over the last decade, faculty-led short-term study abroad has surpassed the longer, more traditional experience in popularity. In the 2014/2015 academic year, 63% of US students who studied abroad did so for durations of eight weeks or less (Institute of International Education, 2016). Only 2.5% of US students who studied abroad during that same period did so for an academic or calendar year. Although your institution may offer other ways to participate in study abroad, this article focuses on the process for developing and running a short-term study abroad course. Even if you have other options, much of the following may still prove helpful.

Although these courses are developed and led by faculty from all disciplines, librarians rarely lead these programs, despite our qualifications as educators. When we tell faculty and librarians we lead a study abroad course, both groups seem equally mystified. Reactions vary, but we have often heard things like, “You are the leaders? Not the assistants?” That’s why, when you approach your supervisor or administration with a proposal to lead study abroad, you should go prepared with evidence about the positive outcomes of study abroad for students as well as its connection with information literacy and libraries.

Our course

When we talk with other librarians about our study abroad course, Information and Global Social Justice, the initial response is generally one of two things. Folks either say that their sole regret in college was not studying abroad…or they tell us that studying abroad changed their life. Our own experiences reflect those two extremes. Laurie wanted to study in Australia, but didn’t due to family concerns. Kelly studied for a full academic year in Italy, which led her to other international educational experiences. Given our backgrounds, when we saw the call for increased faculty-led course proposals at our institution in fall 2014, we both thought about the potential for developing and leading a course. We will discuss the process in greater detail below, but a general understanding of how we conceptualized and structured our course may help you begin to consider what would make sense for your institution.

Our course topic evolved as we developed our proposal. From the beginning, we wanted to focus on creating opportunities for first-time overseas travelers, and to highlight the opportunities for information literacy skill-building in all steps of international travel, from deciding what to pack to navigating a new city. Given our shared personal and professional interest in social justice work, and growing coursework in this area on our campus, we decided to create a course that would introduce students to social justice and to a series of information literacy skills, within a cross-cultural frame. We created the course with the intention that it could be adapted to locations across the globe, depending on the librarians leading it each year. Because we wanted to recruit first-time international travelers, we looked to the most popular locations to study abroad: given Laurie’s experience and interest in Spain and Kelly’s in Italy, it was natural to begin with those two locations. As a result, the course learning outcomes include the following:

Deconstruct assumptions, describe how assumptions are formed, and challenge assumptions through critical reflection and by considering new perspectives.

Locate and synthesize knowledge/information from a variety of sources to research a global social justice issue.

Analyze some key similarities/differences between US and Spanish/Italian cultures.

Based on study abroad best practices Laurie learned about during a one-week immersive faculty seminar, “Learning While Leading: Supporting Intercultural Development Through Study Away,” we designed the course to begin with a week of classes on our home campus before departure. This classroom time allowed our group to build community and confidence, as well as building a foundation of course content. Because the main assignment for the course is a comparative project looking at a social justice issue at home and in the host country, students also began considering potential topics during that week.

We worked with a third-party provider, CIEE, to coordinate our excursions to museums, libraries, non-profits, and other sites, and homestays for the duration of the trip. While some faculty choose to do all these logistics themselves, that means dealing with hotel cancellations or missed trains on top of teaching. Working with a third-party provider allowed us to focus on our students throughout the entire course.

In-country, the line between educational and recreational activities blurred together, in the sense that we were all constantly experiencing and learning new things. Although we wrote up a rough lesson plan before we left for Barcelona, we found ourselves revising nightly in order to incorporate unexpected new information. Regardless, our two hours of classroom time always began with a short guided meditation, and a prompt for written reflection, to provide students time to gather and process their thoughts on everything they’d been experiencing. Each day also included tours, workshops, and social activities. We built in a long weekend without scheduled activities or class time (Friday-Sunday) in the middle of the course, to give our students time to relax and explore on their own.

After the end of our two weeks, we required students to meet with us two additional times to discuss their final projects, before submitting it at the end of the summer. We worked with a library intern to compile the final project as an e-book using the Scalar platform.

In order to make the course more accessible to students, we aggressively sought financial support. The College Assistance Migrant Program (CAMP) at Oregon State provided assistance to two students. Our university librarian created a full scholarship for a current or former student worker in the library, funded by donors. We requested funding from the Division of International Programs for our Pell-eligible students, ultimately arranging for $750 additional funding for each of them. We also worked with students individually to set up or support crowdfunding and other fundraising initiatives; one student raised nearly $1000 through a tamale sale. We also worked with CIEE to identify ways to trim costs on the activities in-country.

Building the Case for Study Abroad

In order to develop a study abroad course at your institution, it is important to start with a strong understanding of the benefits of study abroad for students, as well as understanding what librarians are positioned to contribute.

Faculty and administrators in universities and colleges in the US often use the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AACU) high-impact practices (HIPs) when developing and implementing new programs including study abroad. HIPs are learning and teaching practices that have been shown to increase rates of engagement and retention (Kuh, 2008). A carefully crafted study abroad course can incorporate a majority of the high-impact practices including common intellectual experiences, learning communities, collaborative assignments and projects, undergraduate research, diversity/global learning, and service and community learning.

High-Impact Practices from the AACU (Kuh, 2008)

First-Year Experiences

Common Intellectual Experiences

Learning Communities

Writing Intensive Courses

Collaborative Assignments and Projects

Undergraduate Research

Diversity/Global Learning

Service Learning, Community-Based Learning

Internships

Capstone Courses and Projects

Short-term study abroad experiences appeal to students because they are less expensive than longer programs. A shorter timeline allows students who are enrolled in lockstep-sequence majors, like engineering and education, the opportunity to go abroad without extending their time to graduation. For students who work full time or have family commitments, a shorter course may be the only viable possibility.

As librarians committed to social justice, we were especially interested in increasing the representation of students from communities historically underrepresented in study abroad. Underrepresented is a term that is often used in higher education in the United States to describe students who are not members of the majority (white, cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied) and includes students who identify as LGBTQI, veterans, women, students of color, first-generation, lower income, and/or people with disabilities. The Institute of International Education, which produces the annual Open Doors report about international education related to the US, also gathers and reports race and ethnicity data. Using the Open Doors 2016 “Fast Facts” report, we can see that approximately one quarter of those who studied abroad in 2014/2015 were students of color (Table 1).

Table 1: Percentages of students, by race/ethnicity, who were enrolled in U.S. universities and colleges compared to the percentages that studied abroad in the 2014/15 academic year.
(National Center for Educational Statistics, 2015; Institute of International Education, 2016)

When this percentage is compared to enrollment data provided by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCEE) we can see that students of color are studying abroad at a much lower rate than their white peers (Table 1). As we developed our course, we made purposeful decisions to appeal to and support underrepresented students. Besides the fundraising efforts noted above, we used our relationships with student affairs staff on campus to get the word out to students through the Cultural Resource Centers and other units that work closely with particular communities of students. We chose a two-week period in-country to keep the costs down for students, as well as to be less intimidating to first-time international travelers.

All students experience at least some trepidation when they begin investigating study abroad. Concerns include being away from home, possibly increasing time to graduation, and affording the costs. However, students of color express specific concerns about racism and microaggressions in the host country, racism and microaggressions from their fellow students, and traveling to locations where locals may not have encountered people of their race before (Picard, Bernardino, & Ehigiator, 2009). When talking with students of color, or any student from an underrepresented community, about your course, it is important that you are able to address their concerns while also informing them of the benefits. As the faculty, familiarize yourself with issues in the host country, and be purposeful with your goals and preparation.
In addition to these broad reasons, consider your local context as well. Your institution may have its own particular set of learning outcomes, or stated goals for increasing the number of students going abroad. In our case, at Oregon State University, the Provost stated a goal of tripling the number of students studying abroad within 3-5 years, as part of an initiative to internationalize the university. This push has included greatly expanding the number of faculty-led offerings.

Why librarians are well-suited to lead study abroad

Given the surprised reactions we often get from librarians and others in higher education when we speak about our class, we want to discuss the natural connections between information literacy and study abroad. Although the specific topic of your study abroad course will depend on your areas of interest and expertise, there are several general ways in which study abroad is a natural fit for building information literacy. On the most basic level, being in a new country, surrounded by new signs, language, and culture, requires the ability to find, process, and use information quickly.

A few examples from our class may demonstrate. In order to navigate the Metro public transportation maps in Barcelona, our students had to build a number of skills. Although several students were native Spanish speakers, nearly all of them had grown up in small towns in Oregon with little public transportation, so they had to learn to read the map and discover the process of making payment, in addition to actually getting themselves around and arriving on time, and negotiating the cultural norms of being in crowded subway cars. As the instructors of the course we also learned a lot about the information-seeking behaviors of our students. All of our students were between the ages of 18 and 21, and their automatic practices searching for necessary information—whether something fun to do at night or where to find good Mexican food—were naturally different from our own. One of our students routinely used Tumblr to search for activities, and all the students who brought their smartphones shared real-time experiences with each other via Snapchat. We all used WhatsApp to communicate with one another and with our colleagues in Barcelona, and over the final weekend we watched as our students discussed what to wear out that evening, sharing pictures of possible outfits followed by direct quotes from their host families, “My host mom’s daughter says….”

These fun and sometimes silly exchanges also gave us opportunities to dig deeper into how they knew information was trustworthy or useful. In one class session, students raised questions about the authority of government information in context. We used an on-site computer lab to explore Spanish and Catalan government information websites. As we had seen Catalan flags throughout the city and discussed the independence movement multiple times, students could consider these contesting government bodies in terms of seemingly neutral information. Students discussed why they might choose to focus on the Catalan or even Barcelona statistics, rather than the Spanish ones, depending on their topic and scope. Experiential education provides immediate and real-life applications: our lesson about government information helped students understand why their host families identified as Catalan, not Spanish. Although our library has not broadly adopted the Association of College and Research Libraries Framework for Information Literacy, we have found it fairly easy to map our class against its six frames or core concepts. This particular example certainly demonstrated how authority is constructed and contextual, and gave our students a direct connection between the political power dynamics they’d been learning about and the impact on the availability of information. The approach your institution takes to information literacy or library instruction should inform the case you make for your own course.

In addition to the clear links between study abroad and information literacy, there are also professional benefits to leading study abroad courses. Developing and teaching a study abroad course for undergraduates can raise the visibility of your library and the librarians among students, faculty, and staff while contributing to the overall mission of your university. Faculty of all kinds generally speak about the connections they have built and maintained with international faculty (in our case with libraries and librarians). While in our host country we visited half a dozen libraries and had personal meetings with a number of librarians. We even gave a presentation to a gathering of librarians from around the region, which was then translated into Catalan. Broadening professional networks also builds the reputation of your university and library, and may serve institutional goals around internationalization.

The Planning Process

Starting a study abroad course takes time. We originally began taking steps in fall 2014 for a course that ran for the first time in summer 2016. Although the steps that follow are based on our experience at Oregon State, we have attempted to describe a process that could be adapted to any institution. Your timeline will vary, along with many other pieces of the puzzle, but you’ll notice that relationship-building and strategic advocacy are woven throughout.

Background preparation

Whatever the procedure is for developing a study abroad course, you will need to do a great deal of research before getting started. You will need to identify people to speak with, particularly from the office supporting study abroad, as well as other faculty who have led courses. You may also find it helpful to learn from other institutional handbooks: we found guides from The University of Texas at Austin, the University of Kentucky, and Washington State University to be especially useful. Below are some questions we suggest asking your international office before you get started:

How involved is the international office in planning, recruiting students, and executing the study abroad experience?

If librarians are not faculty at your institution, are they still eligible to lead courses? (Despite the name, other staff may also lead faculty-led courses.)

Does the international office have any recommendations about locations (for example, a popular city/country or a less well-travelled location)?

Do faculty leaders at your institution work with third-party providers in the host country? If so, do they have a list of approved providers?

Does your university provide funding for faculty to conduct a pre-trip to scope out the location?

How are the costs of faculty travel covered during the study abroad?

Does your university offer any funding or scholarships for students on short-term study abroad?

What costs, if any, would the library be responsible for covering?

Who else on campus does your international office recommend you connect with?

Making your proposal

Once you have a sense of the basic procedure, you’ll need to propose a course. In our case, before filling out the standard university procedure for developing a course, we had to propose the course internally to our University Librarian, to ensure that we could take the time to teach the course and get funding to support our travel. Regardless of the procedure at your institution, it is wise to be prepared to explain the benefits that the course will have both within the library and more broadly for the university. As you build your proposal, you might consider the following questions:

What strengths do you bring, individually as instructors or as a unit? This might include language skills, subject expertise, or soft skills.

What gaps exist in current study abroad offerings?

How can you make your program sustainable over time?

Where does the course fit into the university’s curriculum? For example, can it fulfill any core course requirements?

What makes your course appealing to students?

How will the course benefit the library? the university?

Promoting Your Course

Once your course has been approved, you will need to connect with students. How much you will need to promote your course depends on the level of involvement of your international office, the academic home for your course, and the support at your institution for study abroad. Your university may already centrally manage promotion of study abroad, or offer scholarships specific to study abroad. In our case, it was crucial to do ongoing study abroad, in part because study abroad on our campus is largely marketed within each College, to students within those majors. Even if marketing is largely done for you, the following questions may help you connect with students:

What marketing materials (e.g. a website, posters, handouts) can you develop to share information with students and their families? (You may use either of our sites to generate ideas or as a template: studybarcelona.weebly.com or osuitaly.weebly.com.)

Students in particular majors, courses, or programs might be particularly interested in your course—what are they, and how can you connect with them?

What events (e.g. international fairs) and courses can you visit to connect with students?

How can you connect one-on-one with students? Consider regular office hours or ways to set up individual meetings with individual students.

What financial support is available for students? How will you advocate for students getting this support?

What particular concerns might students with marginalized identities have about the host country? How are you prepared to support students if they experience hostility based on their race, sexual orientation, or other identities?

Teaching and Taking Your Students Abroad

Leading a study abroad means many things for the instructors. As we’ve explained, we had to develop the curriculum, recruit for the course, work through the application process with students, help students with their travel arrangements – and that was before the course even began! As you prepare to finally teach your course, consider the following questions:

What are your expectations for student behavior? What are their expectations for you? How will you build community in the classroom and outside?

How will you accommodate unexpected developments? (For example, if a planned activity is canceled, a new topic of interest emerges.)

How will you assess student learning, or the overall success of your program? What reporting is required by your institution?

Conclusions

Leading this course has been one of the most rewarding accomplishments either of us has had in our careers. It was exhausting, exhilarating, surprising, and humbling to learn alongside our seven students for these weeks. We returned with a fresh perspective on making information literacy vital and new hope for building meaningful relationships with our students. We met with each of them twice after returning to Oregon, as students completed their final projects, but also to debrief their experiences. These meetings gave us a chance to hear how our students were synthesizing their learning as they returned to school and home. After compiling the students’ final projects, we created a final report for our library administration, outlining the process, challenges, successes, and making recommendations for the future of the course. Because we had originally proposed it as an annual course, this was a chance for us to clarify what we wanted to build on. We also sent thank you notes to our donors, and began gearing up for the next time.

As we write this, Kelly is preparing for the second year of this class, headed to Ferrara, Italy. Based on our experience in Barcelona, students heading to Italy have already begun to pick and research their topics for their final projects: everything from school lunch nutrition to the experiences of new immigrants to the impact of tourism on historical sites. She will be joined by another librarian, and in 2018 Laurie will return to Barcelona with yet another new librarian co-leader. We have arranged to do this through summer 2020 and then reevaluate the program. Working with campus colleagues, we moved the course through the course approval system to obtain a permanent academic home, with other experiential learning courses. As a part of that process, we also worked with the new Social Justice minor to get the course approved to count toward that program. We built on existing relationships with faculty who run that program, and it was straight-forward to make the case for how the course fits into that program of study. Interestingly, when we reached out to the College of Engineering about marketing the course this year, they told us that it would count toward the Humanitarian Engineering minor, without us even asking. We hope to eventually find a home for it within the general education requirements. Several of our students from last year and this year have worked with their academic advisors to apply the course toward specific requirements, but only on a case-by-case basis. Their write-ups for these requests will serve us as we investigate how to make the course work for requirements for all students. We have connected with other faculty and staff on our campus to lobby for additional funding for underrepresented students to use to study abroad, coordinating efforts into a loose network of advocates.

We have also stayed in touch with our students from last year. Laurie has been a job reference for two of them: one has applied to teach English in Spain after graduating, and another student got a job as a Latinx community liaison at a public library. The former student who is now working in a library told us that visiting public libraries in Barcelona gave her a sense of the potential of libraries as community spaces. While we don’t expect that each year’s class will inspire future library workers, these students have shared the impact that this class and their travels have had so far.

Thank you to our reviewers Annie Pho and Romel Espinel and publishing editor Ryan Randall for their time and assistance with this project, and thank you to Pep Torn for translating our abstract. Thank you to Faye Chadwell, Cheryl Middleton, and Anne-Marie Deitering at Oregon State University Libraries and Press for supporting us in the development and implementation of our study abroad course. And, a final thank you to OSU alumni and faculty who supported our students through scholarships and grant funding.

Latinx is currently the preferred inclusive term that encompasses all genders. Here, the authors retain “Hispanic or Latino(a)” as the terminology used by the Institute of International Education and “Hispanic” as used by the US Department of Education. [↩]

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